Website Carbon Calculator

Want to know how much CO2 is being released by people using your website?

Well, now you can with the website carbon calculator.

Visit websitecarbon.com and enter the address of your website and get some insights into how the website can improve its environmental performance including coding practices and hosting the site using renewable energy.

As a web developer I feel it is a duty of mine to improve the efficiency of the websites that I build in order to limit their environmental impact.

This also feeds into web design and, therefore, by educating web designers and developers on sustainable web design principles, environmental damage can be reduced on a large scale.

To put this into perspective, this article in Nature states that:

ICT’s carbon footprint is on a par with the aviation industry’s emissions from fuel

A large part of that is due to websites being constantly loaded and the ever increasing size of websites, which uses a sizeable amount of electricity each time you load a page.

However, it is not all about carbon, when discussing our actions and the affect the have on the environment. I have written a a blog post about the array of decisions I have taken – from using second-hand equipment, to banking. You can read it here.

What can I do?

3 key ways to reduce a website’s impact are:

– Switching to a green hosting company – this will usually mean your website will run purely on renewable energy

– Make websites as efficient as possible

– Offset any emissions that remain

To find out what I am doing to improve my ecological footprint here in Bristol, head to my other post about sustainable web design.

 

I have detailed some podcasts that explore sustainability and climate change and you can read about them here.